The integration with GDB and Valgrind is to die for. One runthrough with Valgrind and you're given all of the lines that allocated junk left on the heap at shutdown, and tracing with GDB is much easier than with IntelliTrace, as everything has symbols and the call stack isn't interleaved with weird MS wrappers. Personally I'm also very fond of the C code analysis, which is somewhere between the obsessiveness of the Java analysis in NetBeans (although it still complains about missing return statements prematurely) and the laissez-faire and/or neglectful step-uncle attitude of Visual Studio (which also likes to forget the compiler's warning annotations if an object doesn't have to be rebuilt—say goodbye to all of those stupid threats about casting between float and double that it gripes about endlessly... as well as the warnings you actually cared about.)
Still, it's not perfect—my installation at work recently went rogue and decided size_t was ambiguous. That took a lot of wrestling to fix, and I think there may still be a few system headers that it's confused about. I'm definitely much happier using it than VS, though.
There are actually quite a few older programs that hung around from the mid-nineties; I've seen labs that manage all of their plasmids with FileMaker, and ChemOffice has a lot of inertia. Certainly Excel sees a lot more mileage than OpenOffice, and there are a lot of journals that accept Word format. I don't think operating system of choice is something that really gets a lot of advertisement, though, during a project.
Funnily enough, in science it's frequently the opposite. There's a ton of stuff I use every day that's so entrenched in POSIX that a port would never see the light of day—and the compatibility layers just don't complete the circuit. (For instance, the perl headers that ship with the Windows version of MATLAB are more complete in some cases than MinGW's.) Development on Windows itself is also something of a letdown compared to Eclipse CDT on Linux.
I think you've just fallen for some sarcasm—many, many games have been created by directly digitizing hand-drawn artwork, especially for backgrounds. In addition to the very prominent example of Don Bluth games that I gave (which are very literally traditional animation CELs played from a laserdisc), many LucasArts and Sierra adventures relied heavily on hand-painted backgrounds. A lot of fighting games were probably in this category, although I don't know the genre well enough to point out specific examples. Early sprite-based FPSes opted to go with photographs of clay models (Doom), 3D models (Duke Nukem 3D), or live actors (Rise of the Triad), which were then cleaned up in a graphics program (almost invariably DeluxePaint.) Image editing software just wasn't advanced enough yet to provide a worthwhile art medium unless you were already an expert at weaving tapestries.
Sorry, Don Bluth, but this is the hand-drawn game. Despite being much-loved classics, Space Ace and Dragon's Lair will just have to hand over their crown, along with who knows how many other titles, to this one game. Because a Slashdot headline said so.
I have you beat. Root nodules on plants are essentially the same as warts (benign tumours), except the plant actually gets something out of it (mostly nitrogen fixation.)
Define "more neutral", and what politician is in your opinion "more" neutral in such a way that he doesn't make biased statements?
"More neutral" relative to one's own opinion. It is important for a properly functioning democracy to tolerate all beliefs and ethnicities, and as a representative of that democracy, a politician has a responsibility to act on behalf of the state as long as he or she holds public office.
So you equate uttering my belief - that for example my religion is the religion God wants us to follow - is hate speech?
It is inappropriate for a politician to do so in the course of his public duties, but those words verbatim do not constitute hate speech.
Yeah, and when a mayor is jailed in North Korea for things which are not considered "protected speech" in that country, will you act the same? Or is it that you, personally, find that it is OK to put someone in jail for 10 months for what Erdogan said?
That quite honestly depends on what has been said. I was pointing out a technicality in your word choice, not passing judgement over the morality of what happened.
Which, by the way, I don't find "extreme" in any sense. It's metaphorical. If a metaphore is hate speech because it contains words that correlate to military/war, then the saying "being up in arms" is equally hate speech.
Exactly. In every other case I would expect a full thread about freedom of expression, or at least one +5 (Insightful) comment. I don't see anything of the sorts here.
What I've read suggests that it is generally agreed by the Turkish of all beliefs was that the punishment was inappropriate and built on a flimsy premise to put him away. This is not really a matter of free speech rights, but just conventional corruption.
I am guessing that no one here has ventured to comment on the topic because the text of the poem itself is hard to understand without doing a great deal of research into the context of the matter. The statements are very simple and straightforward, but put in different mouths they might mean different things; from an activist opposed to the militancy of a theocracy, for example, it might be an accusation that religion is being abused as a pretense for war. (And when I first read it, I thought that was what it was, making the consequences even more incomprehensible.)
No, not all of them. Some of them would be as poorly off as us, or worse. We have no particular reason to believe we're at the bottom end of development, or that evolution into sentient life takes the same amount of time everywhere, or even that it's favourable everywhere. And given enough alien civilizations, anything can happen, including thugs looking for slaves.
Well, mostly it sets boundaries on the probability that Mars had/has life, as well as how habitable it will be if/when we colonize it. Both of these are pretty big deals.
You'll have to narrow your scope a little: we're pretty sure that all of the interesting bits of evolution (the distinction between bacteria and archaea, the rise of animals, plants, protists, and fungi, multicellularity, and everything since) happened right here. To use a surprisingly good computing analogy, not only do we have the fossil records, but we can compare the source code and see where the forks happened. A lot of the most interesting adaptations are serendipitous re-uses of really old code.
The possibility that living cells might have arrived on Earth is considered something of a toss-up. There have been quite a lot of difficult-to-test proposals about how they could've arisen from fairly basic building blocks here, and they all seem pretty plausible. We're pretty sure about the RNA world hypothesis (the idea that life only started using proteins for enzymes and DNA for storage later, and started off using just what we think of as a makeshift intermediary for everything) but we don't have much of a clue about what happened before that, and we can't say for certain it happened here or not. We also don't know how life went from being a single self-replicating molecule into a membrane-protected cell, nor if there was some storage molecule before RNA that was even simpler to operate on.
However, this article is almost certainly wrong because RNA's inherent stability causes it to evolve at a much faster rate. So at the very least, it's still possible that there was enough time for life to evolve here from pure abiogenesis.
I'm pretty sure we're still working on that last part. The event doesn't have to be that probable, however, due to the Fermi paradox—if it were probable, we'd be tripping over alien civilizations on a daily basis.
That being said, though, an early solar system might have quite a lot of comets with unstable orbits. Any small chunk of rock capable of floating through a dust cloud or nebula might potentially crash into a planet in the solar system. It's been theorized that all of the water on Earth arrived this way, in which case there were definitely enough comets to bring in organic building blocks.
Well, I for one am extremely unfashionable and actually RTFA:
"The flux of organic matter to Earth via comets and asteroids during periods of heavy bombardment may have been as high as 10 trillion kilograms per year, delivering up to several orders of magnitude greater mass of organics than what likely pre-existed on the planet," Goldman said.
The words "heavy bombardment" have particular meaning in the context of solar system history; the most well-known being the (not quite ubiquitously accepted) Late Heavy Bombardment, on the moon, 4.1–3.8 billion years ago. The bit about "millions of years ago" was probably added by the public relations science writer and should have been "billions." They get this stuff wrong all the time.
Admittedly reform is unlikely in this case, and no doubt he will either be killed in retribution shortly after serving his sentence, choose to remain in custody for his own safety, or (as it is feared) do something to justify another prolonged sentence.
However, what you suggest is revenge and is immoral. You have no way of knowing whether or not someone can be reformed without knowing his or her full psychology. If a prisoner does get cured or reforms, which people do sometimes succeed at (like this guy) then the default assumption of an aggressive response has caused damage; the experience of prison and the permanent branding of criminality (hiring discrimination, not being allowed to vote, et cetera) creates an impossible gulf to escape. Society has destroyed the potential for a healthy, productive person to ever exist again, and perhaps worse, is actively repressing it by legal enforcement of stigmas.
An ideal punitive system solves the reason the person committed the crime and then puts the criminal back into society whenever possible. Punishment only creates fresh incentives to commit wrongdoing. This is what the Norwegian system is working towards, however unpopular it may be amongst the people for any reason. It will never be popular because justice is a social construct built around anger, which will not go away any time soon, but it is the right thing to do.
In 1954, when McCarthy held his hearings, Senator Feinstein was completing her BA in History. Congressman Ralph Hall was a county judge, Mr. Conyers was in the US Army, Mrs. Slaughter was a market researcher for a chemicals company and part-time environmental activist, Mr. Rangel was studying for a BS, Col. Johnson was in the Air Force, Mr. Young was in the National Guard, Mr. Coble was in the Coast Guard, Mr. Levin was completing his Masters degree in international relations and moving on to law school...
I think that, out of all the people old enough to have been grown up enough to realise that McCarthyism was happening at all, only Mr. Dingell had any associations with the Federal Government at the time, and that was as a part-time research assistant. I would expect that the people actually old enough to have learned anything from McCarthyism would most likely have retired in the 80s. The people around today were busy with other things—and were so young anyway that they might readily discount the beliefs they held in their youth. (But, more important, is the seemingly sub-sentient consensus-forming caused by weak-willed egos not wanting to stand up against their peers.)
(Here is the oft-repeated source for the Norway figures, by the way. Let me know what you think after reading it, if you haven't already.)
That depends on them not being caught, y'know? As long as GINA's on the books the chances of making a profit are slim to none, since it's hard for most employers to collect a blood or saliva sample systematically without someone noticing.
Subtly Elegant, Lengthily Eloquent Computer Term Suddenly Targeted At Regrettable Tongue-twister.
Another favourite: Interactive Network For Organizing, Retrieving, Manipulating, Accessing, and Transferring Information On National Systems, Unleashing Practically Every Rebellious Human Intelligence, Gratifying Hackers, Wiseasses, And Yahoos.
(I actually wrote some resources for coming up with stupid self-referential acronyms.)
McCarthy was such a disastrously horrible chapter in history that, if anything, the people who remember it are your best defence against it happening again.
Divisive rhetoric doesn't cause rights violations: unifying rhetoric does. The PATRIOT Act was passed 357 to 66 in the House and 98 to 1 in the Senate. That's when the nightmare started. These are politicians too young to remember or be affected by McCarthyism (average age around or below 60), but who grew up during the Cold War and were subject to plenty of the same paranoid propaganda—just without a cautionary tale about holding back.
About data retention: I think either corruption and abuses of power should be fought until collecting a complete database does not automatically entail a risk of privacy violation, or the data should be destroyed after the crime has been laid to rest, regardless of whether or not there was a conviction. It has been demonstrated that convicts who are treated more like people have a lower rate of continued law-breaking; (and to trot out this statistic yet again) the reoffending rate in Norway is only 30% (for violent crimes, I think.) The criminal justice system should (and could) produce people who can be given that benefit of the doubt.
The intelligence community does not have a recent track record of data breaches or partnerships with the healthcare industry. What lobbied-for rights violations are you thinking of in particular? The PATRIOT Act and all of the subsequent security measures were driven by deep paranoia that engulfed the entire government, not lobbying.
Slashdot Mirror
I might look into that—do you have any particular recommendations? I need to be able to compile CPAN packages.
The integration with GDB and Valgrind is to die for. One runthrough with Valgrind and you're given all of the lines that allocated junk left on the heap at shutdown, and tracing with GDB is much easier than with IntelliTrace, as everything has symbols and the call stack isn't interleaved with weird MS wrappers. Personally I'm also very fond of the C code analysis, which is somewhere between the obsessiveness of the Java analysis in NetBeans (although it still complains about missing return statements prematurely) and the laissez-faire and/or neglectful step-uncle attitude of Visual Studio (which also likes to forget the compiler's warning annotations if an object doesn't have to be rebuilt—say goodbye to all of those stupid threats about casting between float and double that it gripes about endlessly... as well as the warnings you actually cared about.)
Still, it's not perfect—my installation at work recently went rogue and decided size_t was ambiguous. That took a lot of wrestling to fix, and I think there may still be a few system headers that it's confused about. I'm definitely much happier using it than VS, though.
There are actually quite a few older programs that hung around from the mid-nineties; I've seen labs that manage all of their plasmids with FileMaker, and ChemOffice has a lot of inertia. Certainly Excel sees a lot more mileage than OpenOffice, and there are a lot of journals that accept Word format. I don't think operating system of choice is something that really gets a lot of advertisement, though, during a project.
It sure is. Isn't that ironic? (Alanis Morissette in 3, 2...)
Funnily enough, in science it's frequently the opposite. There's a ton of stuff I use every day that's so entrenched in POSIX that a port would never see the light of day—and the compatibility layers just don't complete the circuit. (For instance, the perl headers that ship with the Windows version of MATLAB are more complete in some cases than MinGW's.) Development on Windows itself is also something of a letdown compared to Eclipse CDT on Linux.
That would be too ironic to happen.
...I didn't read the second paragraph closely enough. I... I don't know how to feel about this.
I think you've just fallen for some sarcasm—many, many games have been created by directly digitizing hand-drawn artwork, especially for backgrounds. In addition to the very prominent example of Don Bluth games that I gave (which are very literally traditional animation CELs played from a laserdisc), many LucasArts and Sierra adventures relied heavily on hand-painted backgrounds. A lot of fighting games were probably in this category, although I don't know the genre well enough to point out specific examples. Early sprite-based FPSes opted to go with photographs of clay models (Doom), 3D models (Duke Nukem 3D), or live actors (Rise of the Triad), which were then cleaned up in a graphics program (almost invariably DeluxePaint.) Image editing software just wasn't advanced enough yet to provide a worthwhile art medium unless you were already an expert at weaving tapestries.
Sorry, Don Bluth, but this is the hand-drawn game. Despite being much-loved classics, Space Ace and Dragon's Lair will just have to hand over their crown, along with who knows how many other titles, to this one game. Because a Slashdot headline said so.
I have you beat. Root nodules on plants are essentially the same as warts (benign tumours), except the plant actually gets something out of it (mostly nitrogen fixation.)
Pfft. We all know you're a double agent, Anonymous Coward. How else can you explain your schizophrenic posting history?!
Fermat's last theorem requires x = y = z, and argues that there is no answer. This is a generalization.
Define "more neutral", and what politician is in your opinion "more" neutral in such a way that he doesn't make biased statements?
"More neutral" relative to one's own opinion. It is important for a properly functioning democracy to tolerate all beliefs and ethnicities, and as a representative of that democracy, a politician has a responsibility to act on behalf of the state as long as he or she holds public office.
So you equate uttering my belief - that for example my religion is the religion God wants us to follow - is hate speech?
It is inappropriate for a politician to do so in the course of his public duties, but those words verbatim do not constitute hate speech.
Yeah, and when a mayor is jailed in North Korea for things which are not considered "protected speech" in that country, will you act the same? Or is it that you, personally, find that it is OK to put someone in jail for 10 months for what Erdogan said?
That quite honestly depends on what has been said. I was pointing out a technicality in your word choice, not passing judgement over the morality of what happened.
Which, by the way, I don't find "extreme" in any sense. It's metaphorical. If a metaphore is hate speech because it contains words that correlate to military/war, then the saying "being up in arms" is equally hate speech.
Exactly. In every other case I would expect a full thread about freedom of expression, or at least one +5 (Insightful) comment. I don't see anything of the sorts here.
What I've read suggests that it is generally agreed by the Turkish of all beliefs was that the punishment was inappropriate and built on a flimsy premise to put him away. This is not really a matter of free speech rights, but just conventional corruption.
I am guessing that no one here has ventured to comment on the topic because the text of the poem itself is hard to understand without doing a great deal of research into the context of the matter. The statements are very simple and straightforward, but put in different mouths they might mean different things; from an activist opposed to the militancy of a theocracy, for example, it might be an accusation that religion is being abused as a pretense for war. (And when I first read it, I thought that was what it was, making the consequences even more incomprehensible.)
Give it time, give it time... But seriously, the anthropic principle covers a lot of this.
No, not all of them. Some of them would be as poorly off as us, or worse. We have no particular reason to believe we're at the bottom end of development, or that evolution into sentient life takes the same amount of time everywhere, or even that it's favourable everywhere. And given enough alien civilizations, anything can happen, including thugs looking for slaves.
Well, mostly it sets boundaries on the probability that Mars had/has life, as well as how habitable it will be if/when we colonize it. Both of these are pretty big deals.
You'll have to narrow your scope a little: we're pretty sure that all of the interesting bits of evolution (the distinction between bacteria and archaea, the rise of animals, plants, protists, and fungi, multicellularity, and everything since) happened right here. To use a surprisingly good computing analogy, not only do we have the fossil records, but we can compare the source code and see where the forks happened. A lot of the most interesting adaptations are serendipitous re-uses of really old code.
The possibility that living cells might have arrived on Earth is considered something of a toss-up. There have been quite a lot of difficult-to-test proposals about how they could've arisen from fairly basic building blocks here, and they all seem pretty plausible. We're pretty sure about the RNA world hypothesis (the idea that life only started using proteins for enzymes and DNA for storage later, and started off using just what we think of as a makeshift intermediary for everything) but we don't have much of a clue about what happened before that, and we can't say for certain it happened here or not. We also don't know how life went from being a single self-replicating molecule into a membrane-protected cell, nor if there was some storage molecule before RNA that was even simpler to operate on.
However, this article is almost certainly wrong because RNA's inherent stability causes it to evolve at a much faster rate. So at the very least, it's still possible that there was enough time for life to evolve here from pure abiogenesis.
I'm pretty sure we're still working on that last part. The event doesn't have to be that probable, however, due to the Fermi paradox—if it were probable, we'd be tripping over alien civilizations on a daily basis.
That being said, though, an early solar system might have quite a lot of comets with unstable orbits. Any small chunk of rock capable of floating through a dust cloud or nebula might potentially crash into a planet in the solar system. It's been theorized that all of the water on Earth arrived this way, in which case there were definitely enough comets to bring in organic building blocks.
Well, I for one am extremely unfashionable and actually RTFA:
"The flux of organic matter to Earth via comets and asteroids during periods of heavy bombardment may have been as high as 10 trillion kilograms per year, delivering up to several orders of magnitude greater mass of organics than what likely pre-existed on the planet," Goldman said.
The words "heavy bombardment" have particular meaning in the context of solar system history; the most well-known being the (not quite ubiquitously accepted) Late Heavy Bombardment, on the moon, 4.1–3.8 billion years ago. The bit about "millions of years ago" was probably added by the public relations science writer and should have been "billions." They get this stuff wrong all the time.
Admittedly reform is unlikely in this case, and no doubt he will either be killed in retribution shortly after serving his sentence, choose to remain in custody for his own safety, or (as it is feared) do something to justify another prolonged sentence.
However, what you suggest is revenge and is immoral. You have no way of knowing whether or not someone can be reformed without knowing his or her full psychology. If a prisoner does get cured or reforms, which people do sometimes succeed at (like this guy) then the default assumption of an aggressive response has caused damage; the experience of prison and the permanent branding of criminality (hiring discrimination, not being allowed to vote, et cetera) creates an impossible gulf to escape. Society has destroyed the potential for a healthy, productive person to ever exist again, and perhaps worse, is actively repressing it by legal enforcement of stigmas.
An ideal punitive system solves the reason the person committed the crime and then puts the criminal back into society whenever possible. Punishment only creates fresh incentives to commit wrongdoing. This is what the Norwegian system is working towards, however unpopular it may be amongst the people for any reason. It will never be popular because justice is a social construct built around anger, which will not go away any time soon, but it is the right thing to do.
In 1954, when McCarthy held his hearings, Senator Feinstein was completing her BA in History. Congressman Ralph Hall was a county judge, Mr. Conyers was in the US Army, Mrs. Slaughter was a market researcher for a chemicals company and part-time environmental activist, Mr. Rangel was studying for a BS, Col. Johnson was in the Air Force, Mr. Young was in the National Guard, Mr. Coble was in the Coast Guard, Mr. Levin was completing his Masters degree in international relations and moving on to law school...
I think that, out of all the people old enough to have been grown up enough to realise that McCarthyism was happening at all, only Mr. Dingell had any associations with the Federal Government at the time, and that was as a part-time research assistant. I would expect that the people actually old enough to have learned anything from McCarthyism would most likely have retired in the 80s. The people around today were busy with other things—and were so young anyway that they might readily discount the beliefs they held in their youth. (But, more important, is the seemingly sub-sentient consensus-forming caused by weak-willed egos not wanting to stand up against their peers.)
(Here is the oft-repeated source for the Norway figures, by the way. Let me know what you think after reading it, if you haven't already.)
That depends on them not being caught, y'know? As long as GINA's on the books the chances of making a profit are slim to none, since it's hard for most employers to collect a blood or saliva sample systematically without someone noticing.
Subtly Elegant, Lengthily Eloquent Computer Term Suddenly Targeted At Regrettable Tongue-twister.
Another favourite: Interactive Network For Organizing, Retrieving, Manipulating, Accessing, and Transferring Information On National Systems, Unleashing Practically Every Rebellious Human Intelligence, Gratifying Hackers, Wiseasses, And Yahoos.
(I actually wrote some resources for coming up with stupid self-referential acronyms.)
McCarthy was such a disastrously horrible chapter in history that, if anything, the people who remember it are your best defence against it happening again.
Divisive rhetoric doesn't cause rights violations: unifying rhetoric does. The PATRIOT Act was passed 357 to 66 in the House and 98 to 1 in the Senate. That's when the nightmare started. These are politicians too young to remember or be affected by McCarthyism (average age around or below 60), but who grew up during the Cold War and were subject to plenty of the same paranoid propaganda—just without a cautionary tale about holding back.
About data retention: I think either corruption and abuses of power should be fought until collecting a complete database does not automatically entail a risk of privacy violation, or the data should be destroyed after the crime has been laid to rest, regardless of whether or not there was a conviction. It has been demonstrated that convicts who are treated more like people have a lower rate of continued law-breaking; (and to trot out this statistic yet again) the reoffending rate in Norway is only 30% (for violent crimes, I think.) The criminal justice system should (and could) produce people who can be given that benefit of the doubt.
The intelligence community does not have a recent track record of data breaches or partnerships with the healthcare industry. What lobbied-for rights violations are you thinking of in particular? The PATRIOT Act and all of the subsequent security measures were driven by deep paranoia that engulfed the entire government, not lobbying.